My take on the Tree of Life change

Well, the Druid class preview hit about a week ago, and I was quite giddy with anticipation. I don't think I'd been that excited since the Burning Crusade class preview (Wrath's was rather boring for a feral soloist. A healing spell and a raid finisher? Yawn.) That was until I read this little tidbit:

Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

The druid community has been in quite an uproar since this was announced, with calls of "Save the trees!" appearing everywhere, even though about a year ago, it appeared the druid community was split 50/50 between people who liked Tree of Life and people who didn't. Still, such a radical change certainly deserves some scrutiny. For the record, in spite of what the announcement said, this is not an issue of mechanics. There is no reason that any of the bonuses we get in tree form can't be baked into the other resto talents. This is also not a matter of druids lacking an emergency healing ability (Nature's Swiftness is rather underwhelming), since we can always be given one, or they could improve Nature's Swiftness. No, at its heart, this issue is one thing and one thing only: cosmetic. Should healing druids be trees at all times, or should they be able to be in their caster form?

I already touched upon this issue a bit in my take on "The disappearance of the bear", so here are the bits from that post that are relevant to our current issue:

"WoW is a very visual game, but I am surprised that players actually have time to look at their characters during raids... I suppose I am biased in this issue, since any dedicated druid will have long given up on their forms being as cool as other people's armor. Like I said, though, time spent in combat leaves little time for admiring your character's shiny gear, and if you really want to see the gear, you can spend time out of combat in caster form... Armor is cool, but there is plenty of time for admiring it when you are going from place to place on a mount or waiting between a wipe and the next pull. These times are much more appropriate for thinking about how cool your armor is than during battle..."

With that said, I would also like to address the point brought up by Blizzard that "it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time." Any druid will tell you that anyone who rolled a druid hoping to admire their armor while in combat picked the wrong class to play. Druids are masters of shapeshifting, and our shifting allows us to visually make a statement about what we will be doing. We don't shapeshift to give ourselves a temporary boost; we shapeshift because that is what we druids do. To have one spec not fit that mold just for the sake of letting us look at our armor (which, as I already mentioned, is a point I don't give much credit to) seems to be an unnecessary break from that design. After all, Moonkin Form is similar to Tree of Life in terms of its necessity by game standards, yet it is staying as a permanent form. Why change Tree of Life?

Now, I know people reading this are probably thinking that I am just suffering from a case of reactionary "They changed it now it sucks" thinking, but that shouldn't surprise you. Since this issue is a completely visual one, it's one that cannot be decided easily by rational thinking and is better decided by emotion. I know Blizzard has said that Tree of Life has become more and more of a visual spell and made less of a difference in our play-style, but the same can be said of Moonkin form. I'd much rather Blizzard address the issues that Tree of Life has (constriction of our spell arsenal, lack-luster model) than scrap it and only make us use it every once in a while. I ask, why change tree form? Why change that which is so fundamental to the class without changing it universally across all of our specs? Why make restoration the exception? This change is simply without merit.

I think Big Bear Butt said it best: "I know that Ghostcrawler seems to feel that the Treeform mechanic doesn’t add anything to the game, it doesn’t bring anything special to the Restoration Druid’s table. It does. What it brings is Treeform itself. What he just doesn’t seem to grasp is that Treeform, for a Restoration Druid, is a goal in and of itself. Not something to be pity Glyphed, but an outwards symbol of a Druid Healer’s resolve." [source]

Raiding advice for people who raid infrequently

I am part of a unique group within World of Warcraft: I have a character at the level cap, and yet I rarely raid. I do raid occasionally, but I do it so infrequently that the way I approach raids is fundamentally different from the way regular raiders approach raids. I know I'm not alone in this. Some of us don't raid because our schedules are so inconsistent that we can't commit to raiding with a guild at specific times each week. Some of us don't raid because we play the game to relax, and having all of those other people depending on you performing your job perfectly, ready to pounce on you if you mess up, is anything but relaxing. Some of us simply don't want to repeatedly fight the same bosses over and over again just to earn the right to fight more bosses over and over again. Whatever our reason, we simply would rather not group up with 9 or 24 other people to fight bosses on a regular basis.

That doesn't mean that we don't ever raid. Sure, there are people out there who never do step into the raiding scene, but some of us do dip our feet. We come along when our guild says they need a healer, we PuG a single-encounter raid (like Onyxia or Sartharion), or we may even get bored one night a run a longer raid all the way through. Hell, we may even enjoy it. However, stepping into the raiding scene from heroics can be a scary prospect, which brings us to this post. What follows is advice for people who wish to raid infrequently, just to see what it is like, but don't know how to get started. If you raid regularly or at least have raided, this advice isn't for you. However, if you don't fit into either of those categories and would like to fit into the latter, then to quote Wowhead, "OK HERE IS HOW SO LISSEN GUD."

1. Start small.
The single-boss raid dungeons are good places to start if you want to dip your feet into raiding. They don't require much more time than a heroic, so they will allow you to adjust to all of the other aspects of raiding that will be new to you: the increased number of people, the increased complexity of the encounters, etc. Running those raids also means only needing to learn one boss strategy (or one and a few more simple ones for the sub-bosses). As such, try to start raiding with Obsidian Sanctum, or, if you gear is good enough, Onyxia's Lair.

2. Be realistic about what you can handle.
If you don't raid frequently, you may not have the skills and habits common to most raiders that you need to carry you through the raid. As such, you may need to make up for that lack of skill with your gear. As a casual raider, I can tell you that out-gearing content is a great help when you want to dip your feet in raiding but don't think you have the skills for it. Sure, gear can only take you so far, but it certainly helps. If you just want dip your feet in raiding, use a site like be.imba to gauge the general quality of your gear, then try running a raid that won't offer many upgrades for you. If you get more comfortable with raiding, you can move up into the "upgrade range," meaning you can try running raids that may help you upgrade your gear.

You may be asking, how can one over-gear a raid without ever raiding? Heroics. Heroics these days are an easy ways gear up for raids without needing to raid, helping you catch up with other people in terms of your gear. Even in the days when heroics only dropped Emblems of Heroism, I used heroics to get the best gear one could get without entering a raid, and was more than prepared for Naxx-10. Since then, getting gear through heroics has only gotten easier.

3. Know the strategies
If you don't raid frequently, it isn't worth your RAM to download a mod like Deadly Boss Mods to help you anticipate a boss's attack. As such, you need to know the in-game cues that make raiding without DBM possible. It's imperative that you read the strategies for the bosses in whatever raid you plan on running so that you can be prepared for them. Knowing what attacks are coming and knowing when they will come is an integral part of raiding, and you need to be intimately familiar with the strategies to do that. As a guild I was once in said, casual raiding is not sloppy raiding. You don't get to do this frequently; give it your all. If that all seems like too much to take in, then as Saniel said bellow, ask for a brief reminder of the strategies before each boss fight. Sometimes one little reminder is all it takes to bring back what you read earlier.

4. You are in this for the long-haul.
One of the biggest shocks for a first time raider is just how long the bosses take to kill. Bosses can take anywhere from five to ten minutes to kill, so get used to being in this for the long-haul. If you are a healer, use your mana-restoring abilities early and often and make sure you have enough MP5 so that you don't run out of mana. If you are a DPS, use your cooldowns early and often (unless you need to save them for a burst phase) so that you can cause maximum damage. Above all, don't be surprised when you see how slowly the boss's health meter falls. Also be prepared for how long a raid will take; most non-single-encounter raids will take you a few hours unless you run with a group of people who know the raid inside and out and out-gear it immensely. You probably won't finish the raid in one night, so don't be surprised if your raid leader asks whether you plan on showing up the next night to continue.

My personal philosophy of the meaning of life

Considering all that I have written looking at WoW from a philosophical point of view, it's amazing how little I have used this blog to look at greater things philosophically. Oh sure, I've looked philosophically at non-WoW-related things in the past, but I'm talking about something greater, the biggest thing one can look at philosophically, the very thing philosophy was conceived of in the exploration of: life. I went through an ordeal this weekend through which I gained greater clarity into my viewpoint of the world, and after going through that, I have been inspired to share my view of life here.

For starters, I am an absurdist. I believe that our existence is inherently without meaning, though it is still the prerogative of the individual to attempt to find meaning in his life. However, that search has yielded little for me. Much of my existential musings in the past have been over what the meaning of it all is, and I could never come up with an answer that satisfied me. That was until I realized what I now see as the truth: our lives are meaningless. We are simply the result of unguided evolutionary change, and our search meaning is simply the result of an advanced mind no longer being occupied by the needs of survival.

You may be wondering, why would I be so interested in philosophy if I am an absurdist and think that our lives are without meaning? Well, the meaning of life is merely one philosophical question. Though many people think of it as the ultimate issue of philosophy, it is merely one of many. (If anything, the question of suicide is the ultimate question of philosophy, at least according to Albert Camus, but that is another topic.) To say that an absurdist cannot hold philosophical beliefs just because he doesn't believe that life has a basis meaning is like saying an atheist cannot have faith in anything just because he doesn't have faith in God. An atheist can still have faith that humans are basically good, or that hope is worth having, or that he will find love, and similarly, an absurdist can examine things philosophically even if he thinks life is without meaning.

Back on topic: for the longest time, I simply ignored the fact that my life was inherently meaningless, for it was too depressing to deal with. My lack of faith in a higher power or an afterlife certainly didn't help to allay my sorrow, but I found ways of coping. One was in recognizing that the possibility of death truly being the end should not be a frightening thought; it should be a freeing thought. If death is truly the end and there is nothing for us beyond the grave, then death truly is the great escape. It is a state without remorse, without regret. It is a liberation from the absurd, for once we are gone, we can no longer ponder our absurdity. However, this solace in the idea of death as the end did not help the issue I faced premortem. If life was meaningless, and death was an escape from the meaninglessness, why live?

I realize now that the angst I put myself through while pondering this question stemmed from the fact that I thought there was an answer. I thought that there had to be some larger meaning to my life that I was just missing, and that if I found that meaning, all of my issues would be solved. I somehow believed this while still publicly professing the belief that our lives are inherently meaningless. I suppose I was too afraid to face the absurd in my private life, even when I publicly put up the facade of having faced it, but that finally changed. The big change came when I read Albert Camus' The Stranger, in which Camus explores the idea of the absurd* and how man can react to it. Without spoiling too much of the plot, I'll say that the protagonist, Meursault, eventually comes to terms with the absurd and comes to the belief that man can face the absurd and live anyways.

This somehow brought about a great change in how I saw the world. I realized that to reject the possibility of higher meaning is to affirm the mundane, to affirm our earthly existence, and to affirm that it is enough, that we do not need a higher meaning to keep living. Two passages from the book brought about this realization in me. One takes place when a chaplain is talking to Meursault, trying to convince him to turn to God, and Meursault tells the chaplain exactly what he thinks of his philosophy: "But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me." That passage made me realize that when we hope for more than just the absurd, we negate the possibility of being happy within the absurd. However, the absurd is all we have; if we wish to be truly happy, we must embrace the absurdity of our existence. We must embrace our suffering, our joy, our life, our death, for they are all we have. When we embrace these things, we no longer need any sort of higher justification for them.

The other passage that really spoke to me takes place when the chaplain asks Meursault, "Do you really love this earth as much as all that?" In the context of the story, it made me realize that when we can affirm our earthly existence and be satisfied with only that, we don't need anything else. We don't need a greater meaning to our lives, we don't need something intangible to make our lives worth living, hell, we don't need anything to make our lives worth living. Loving life is reason enough to live.

The practical question (at least for me; if experience has shown me anything, it's that my beliefs and the subsequent questions I ask are hardly universal) is, how can someone reach that point where life is reason enough to live? Well, affirming the absurd is probably a start. By recognizing that the mundane is all we have and that nothing can come of searching for anything more, we stop seeing the physical world as something to be surpassed. This world is all we have; to try to move beyond it is to be trapped by disappointment. Still, the question remains: why? Why put forth the effort to live in this world? Why face the sorrow that will inevitably visit someone who faces the absurd? Why live a meaningless life? I suppose this article has come full circle, for those are exactly the questions that motivated my first forays into philosophy. So, I ask again: why live?

For me, I am the answer to that question; the thing that makes life worth living is me. If the mundane is all I have, then I am the only thing I can depend on. If there is no higher meaning or power that I can rely on to give my life purpose, who else can do such a thing other than myself? I am the only other option. I live so that I can live. I put forth the effort so that I can reap the rewards. I face the sorrow so that I can experience the joy. I live a meaningless life because it is the only life I have; I may as well make the best of it. These are all things I could have said and believed before discovering The Stranger, but having a reason behind them makes them all the more powerful.

I suppose my philosophy on life could be summed up by saying that the mundane, physical, absurd world is all we have. From there, the other pieces seem to fall into place rather nicely.

*For the uninitiated, the Absurd is defined as the fundamental disconnect between human interests and an indifferent world. In layman's terms, its the fact that our desires really have no meaning or value other than what meaning or value we give them.

What improvements might Blizzard make to the badge/emblem system?

Edit: Blizzard recently announced exactly what changes they will be making to the badge system, so we no longer need to wonder what they will do. Though I didn't anticipate them changing it to a point-based system, they will be implementing a system where there are two types of gear currency, and when a new tier of gear is released, the better type is converted to the lesser type. All I can say is, called it!

The addition of the Emblematic feat of strength in the last patch, sent people into a flurry of speculation about the fate of the emblem system in Cataclysm, but there's one thing we know: it's not likely that Blizzard will simply do away with the emblem system. Instead, they are probably going to change it; after all, we know they didn't like certain aspects of the Badge of Justice system, and we know they don't like certain aspects of the emblem system, so the question is, how can they change gear currency in the next expansion to address the issues that badges and emblems had?

One of the things Blizzard didn't like about the Badge of Justice system was that people could stock-pile badges and buy gear the day it was released. This was not their intention, so they put in emblems with the tiered system we know today. That way, people couldn't run heroics before a patch to stock up on emblems and buy gear the next day; they would have to run heroics after the patch, which was much closer to Blizzard's intentions. Problem is, with five tiers of emblems, things get confusing. Needing to trade down your emblems three or four times to buy heirloom gear is tedious, and it can be annoying to need to talk to multiple vendors just to see what gear you can buy with your emblems. Whatever changes Blizzards makes to the emblems system will need to address these issues.

I have seen suggestions before as to ways to improve the emblem system, but many of these have issues of their own. Some have suggested automatically upgrading emblems to the next tier when a patch hits, but this creates the same issue that Badges of Justice had in that you can stockpile emblems for the next patch. Some have also suggested making old gear be exchanged for the new emblems when a patch drops, but this would prevent your from using the emblems you had stockpiled to buy it. One simple solution is to allow higher-tier emblems to automatically downgrade when you buy something, but this would create issues of its own. People would probably accidentally spend emblems they didn't mean to spend, and imagine the horror of trying to refund them automatically.

Whatever new system is put in place, it would need to motivate people to run heroics all the way through Cataclysm's duration (like Wrath's system), rather than encouraging people to run heroics in bulk to save up emblems to buy gear immediately after the patch drops. One option is to use a system similar to Badges of Justice, but to inflate the cost of gear much more dramatically as the expansion goes on while also increasing the amount of emblems that drop from bosses. This would discourage people from running heroics in advance while still keeping things simple, but the cost of gear would probably reach absurd levels, and people would still farm heroics to get gear the minute it is released. It would also mean emblem achievements be worth less as the expansion wears on.

Perhaps emblems could be demoted as patches went on and be given better gear they can buy. Let me explain what I mean. Suppose that emblems are replaced with a currency we'll call seals. When Cataclysm launches, there would be two kinds of seals: Gleaming Seals of Justice, and Seals of Justice. Heroics (and ten-mans, if Blizzard wants 25-man raids to drop better gear currency) would drop Seals of Justice, while 25-mans and your first daily heroic would drop Gleaming Seals of Justice. GSoJs would be used to buy gear equivalent to 25-man drops, while SoJs would be used to buy gear equivalent to 10-man drops. Now, when a new patch with a new round of gear is released, all of your GSoJs would be demoted to regular SoJs (the idea being that time has made them lose their sheen), but all of the gear that had previously been bought with GSoJs will instead be bought with regular SoJs. Only the latest round of gear would be bought with GSoJs. And, of course, GSoJs could be traded down for regular SoJs.

This kind of system is not without its flaws. One could easily chain-run heroics early in the expansion to save up regular SoJs, then use those SoJs to buy the second best gear later in the expansion. However, the best gear would still only be available to those who continue to run heroics, and someone who is the kind of person to run heroics to save up seals for new gear is probably the kind of person who would want the best gear and would keep running heroics to get it. Players may also feel indignant about their "good" seals being transformed into "bad" seals, even though the "bad" seals would be capable of everything the "good" seals had been capable of before the patch was released. Players may also feel that it isn't worth it to spend their regular seals now when they can get better gear with them later, but if today's system didn't evoke feelings of, "Why run heroics now when running them later will give me better badges?" then I doubt seals will evoke a similar feeling.

Sadly, I cannot come up with some magic system that can solve all of the issues emblems have (if I could, I'd be writing up my resumé to submit to Blizzard, not writing up this blog post.). Considering that the Cataclysm press beta-invites have already gone out, perhaps we'll soon have some idea of just what Cataclysm has in store for us and our emblems. I am quite eager to see what Blizzard decides to do.

Druid healing in heroics, part II

I have already covered the basics of healing in heroics with this flowchart, but a flowchart cannot give the whole picture (see what I did there?), so this post will be a companion guide to that flowchart. For the record, the strategies herein are for druids who are still using heroics to gear up; if you already out-gear heroics, then just follow Jen's strategy:
1. Rejuv the tank
2. (Optional) WG the group
3. Afk until the Rejuv runs out
4. Collect emblems
What follows is advice for people who don't have good enough gear to follow this strategy. This advice is also meant to help healers build the habits they will need when they enter the raid scene.

1. Get some sort of HUD mod that puts your health bar in plain view.
One of the main issues new healers face is forgetting to heal themselves; they get so focused on keeping everyone else's health bars topped off that they forget about their own. That's why I recommend you get a mod like IceHUD (that's the one I use) that puts your health bar in the middle of the screen so it is right in your face. Here's a picture of it in action:














It may seem like it would just be in the way, but trust me, this bar is a life-saver. Having my health Bar right there is the only way I can remember to heal myself. You may want to man it out and try to watch your own bar along with everyone else's, but though your intentions may be good, they won't be worth anything when your carcass is on the ground not healing your party. Trust me; get the mod, or one similar to it. I use it all the time, so it's not a bad addition to your usual mod lineup.

2. Healing Priority: Tank, you, DPS
In heroics these days, you aren't likely to encounter situations where you will need to prioritize healing, but these situation do arise. Your tank may get overzealous with his pull, or you may get Moragg in Violet Hold, or you may be plopped in a Frozen Halls instance. Either way, remember this: the tank must survive. When you need to decide between dropping a heal on the tank and anyone else, the tank's survival comes first. Your survival comes next, for, without your healing, the party will drop like flies. Now, this does not mean that your should not heal your DPS; without them, the boss won't die. However, most DPS these days are in such good gear that they don't need to be healed immediately; still, clothies will be clothies, so if you and the tank are all set for healing, make sure the DPS gets their share.

3. Use Barkskin if you are attacked.
Nothing too complicated about that. Barkskin reduces the damage you take and allows you to heal without your spells being delayed by damage, so if enemies decide to head your way, toughen up a bit with this spell. I also recommend using it before using Tranquility so as not to lose ticks of that spell.

4. Use Innervate when your mana reaches 10,000 less than its maximum.
Innervate restores 7866 mana at level 80, or about 8,000. Since it is your main way to get back mana, you want to have it available frequently, especially when you move into raids, where boss fights will be long enough to allow you to use Innervate two or three times. As such, you want to use it early, but how early? If you use it when you are lacking exactly 8,000 mana, you may regenerate mana in the time that Innervate is active, causing you reach maximum mana and waste your innervate. If you wait until you are lacking 10,000 mana, you probably won't regenerate enough mana to cause you to waste the mana you gain from Innervate. So, if you have 30,000 mana, use Innervate when you have 20,000.

5. Rebirth the tank if the fight is salvageable; rebirth a person capable of resurrection if it is not.
Let's say your tank has died on a boss fight, but that Death Knight DPS went into Frost Presence and took control. He can tank it for now, but you know he won't last long (of course, in a heroic, he will, but we are building habbits for raids, here). In this case, the fight is salvagable, so use Rebirth on the tank and heal him as quickly as you can so he can get back in the game and start tanking again. Now, suppose the tank has died and none of your DPS can off-tank. In this case, the boss will probably rush through and massacre your party before you can resurrect the tank and get his health back up, and if no DPS survive, the fight will take forever. As such, if any of your DPS can resurrect, it's better to use Rebirth on them once they have died. They can then wait for the fight to end, then accept your rebirth and resurrect everyone else. That way, people don't need to run through the heroic again. Note that, in most heroics these days, you are unlikely to encounter a situation where using Rebirth on a DPS is better than using it on the tank, but again, you are building habits for raids here. In fact, you probably won't ever use Rebirth in a heroic, but still, if you encounter a situation where you do need to use it, it's important to know how.

I accidentally posted this early, so you get your advice early this week.

Some miscellaneous news

As you should know by looking at the side bar, I am participating in Revive and Rejuvenate's Great Blog Noblegarden Egg Hunt. There is an egg hidden somewhere on this site; you'll know you've found it because it's the only thing on this site that isn't in this post that can be easily recognized as an egg. If you haven't yet found it, I thought I'd give you a basic hint so you don't squander your time: you won't find the egg with just your eyes.

Also, in case it wasn't obvious, my last post was a prank for April Fool's Day. Most of you will probably think I am pointing out the obvious by saying that, but as someone who has difficulty detecting tongue-in-cheek humor, I know that I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish prank from reality, so I figured I'd point it out anyways.

Finally, I may be putting my advice posts in partial retirement soon. I seem to have reached the point where I have run out of good advice to give, and I'd rather not post filler posts just to put up advice on Wednesday. I will still post advice posts if I have something to advise on, and I will probably take the advice column out of partial retirement once Cataclysm comes out, when there will be a slew of new content to advise on. Until then, when I have no advice to give, Wednesday's posts will be either miscellany or philosophy. I still plan to write the companion guide to my Resto heroic healing flowchart, so my advice posts certainly won't disappearing; they'll just be more sparse.

Planned posts

Hello everyone. I have decided to give you all a look at my list. What is the list, you ask? Well, many bloggers have a list; the list is simply ideas for posts. We bloggers refer to our lists when we need ideas of something to write about, so consider this a preview of posts I will write about in the future. I hate to leave you hanging on how I will expand on these topics and justify these points, but really, I wouldn't share my best ideas with you; those I keep tucked away so they can be a surprise. For that reason, the advice I will provide in these advice posts and the logic I will follow in these philosophy posts should be obvious to you.

Planned advice posts:
How to best use the damage meters and gearscore mods in heroics to ensure a smooth, noob-less run.
How to get away with checking off the tank slot to get into heroics quickly.
How to run heroics in unenchanted BoE greens.
Reasons to ditch a dungeon run early.
Button mashing and you.
Ganking 101.

Planned philosophy posts:
Why Eclipse should be even more random than it is now.
Why twinks should not be separated into their own battlegrounds.
In defense of retcons.
Why there should be gem slots on low-level gear.
Why Garrosh will make a much better warchief than Thrall.
Why Blizzard should not make all specs raid viable.
Why paladins clearly need to be buffed.
Why Ghostcrawler should spend less time relaying the design team's thought onto the forums.